Speaker 1: What is creativity and how does it work in the brain?
Speaker 1: Are all brains creative? And what does that tell us
Speaker 1: about the evolution of species and the evolution of ideas?
Speaker 1: How do the arts expose what's happening in the brain,
Speaker 1: and what does that have to do with how cell
Speaker 1: phones got their names? And why koala bears don't write novels.
Speaker 1: Welcome to Inner Cosmos with me David Eagleman. I'm a
Speaker 1: neuroscientist and an author at Stanford and in these episodes
Speaker 1: we dive into our three pound universe to uncover the
Speaker 1: most surprising secrets behind our daily lives. Today's episode is
Speaker 1: about creativity. What is it and how do brains do it?
Speaker 1: And why do human brains do it better than anyone
Speaker 1: else in the animal kingdom? So I'm going to start
Speaker 1: tangentially with two stories that have hit the news in
Speaker 1: recent weeks. The first is that there are no fewer
Speaker 1: than nine copyright infringement lawsuits raging in the courts right now,
Speaker 1: with groups suing Open Ai and Meta and other companies
Speaker 1: for hundreds of millions of dollars. Now, the groups suing
Speaker 1: are creatives, they're writers, and they're suing because their books
Speaker 1: were consumed in the training of these massive generative AI systems,
Speaker 1: these large language models like CHATCHPT. So one of the
Speaker 1: suits calls this quote systematic theft on a mass scale.
Speaker 1: In other words, the suit asserts that these large language
Speaker 1: models are producing nothing fundamentally new. They're just recycling the
Speaker 1: old and they're remixing that in different way ways. Okay,
Speaker 1: so that was one story. The second story in the
Speaker 1: news is that the company under Armour made an advertisement
Speaker 1: that featured a boxer named Anthony Joshua, and this set
Speaker 1: off a firestorm on Instagram because this claimed to be
Speaker 1: the first AI powered sports commercial. Now the critics are
Speaker 1: hating on it because they say the ad is just
Speaker 1: repurposing work from other humans other creatives without proper acknowledgment.
Speaker 1: And the debate around both these stories is highlighting the
Speaker 1: broad issue of whether AI is going to undermine human
Speaker 1: creativity because it treats all the accomplishments of previous artists
Speaker 1: just as training data for doing its own thing, for
Speaker 1: generating its own content, which it then takes credit for.
Speaker 1: So many creatives are arguing that AI is going to
Speaker 1: diminish the value of human creativity. It simply remixes things
Speaker 1: that act o people have done before it. So that's
Speaker 1: what I want to talk about today, because human creativity
Speaker 1: is the most important reason our species has achieved what
Speaker 1: it has. When you fly over a forest and you
Speaker 1: look down on it from an airplane, the species in
Speaker 1: that forest are doing the same thing that they were
Speaker 1: doing one hundred thousand years ago. There's no difference. But
Speaker 1: when you reach your destination and you're coming into any
Speaker 1: modern city, you can see that the landscape has been
Speaker 1: so influenced by one single species that it looks like
Speaker 1: a giant, colorful motherboard of buildings has risen out of
Speaker 1: the ground. There's something really different going on about humans,
Speaker 1: And it's a reasonable question to ask, why don't squirrels
Speaker 1: design elevators, Why don't alligators invent speedboats? Why don't koalas
Speaker 1: spend their free time building an internet to surf? So
Speaker 1: we're going to get into that shortly. Let me just
Speaker 1: say that the reason we are communicating over a podcast,
Speaker 1: shooting zeros and ones across the planet to transmit a
Speaker 1: message from one human mouth to multiple human ears, is
Speaker 1: because we are doing something very different than any other species.
Speaker 1: We have occupied every corner of the planet. We have
Speaker 1: a million human beings above the clouds at any moment
Speaker 1: because of air travel. We have humans floating in the
Speaker 1: International Space Station, and we've landed on other orbiting bodies
Speaker 1: like the Moon, and our machines have landed on Mars.
Speaker 1: And no other animal has even invented the wheel or
Speaker 1: discovered fire, much less coordinated millions of its congeners into
Speaker 1: kingdoms and nations. So let's be clear that there's something
Speaker 1: very different going on with our species. Homo sapiens represents
Speaker 1: a runaway species, and that term the runaway species is
Speaker 1: in fact the title of a book that I wrote
Speaker 1: with my close friend Anthony Brandt. Anthony is a professor
Speaker 1: of music composition at the Shepherd School of Music, which
Speaker 1: is part of Rice University, and generally he is a
Speaker 1: sharp and sensitive thinker about creativity and he's a real
Speaker 1: student of the brain. So years ago he and I
Speaker 1: were getting a cup of coffee and we started talking
Speaker 1: about creativity from the psychology point of view, from the
Speaker 1: neuroscience point of view, from the point of view of
Speaker 1: artistic endeavor, and we realized that our views on this
Speaker 1: converged so much so that we both learned a lot
Speaker 1: and we realized that we had a framework for understanding
Speaker 1: what the creative act is, and we ended up writing
Speaker 1: this book together. So I called up Anthony today to
Speaker 1: be part of this conversation with me, and I started
Speaker 1: by asking him what NASA and Picasso have in common.
Speaker 2: You know, back in nineteen seventy there was the famous
Speaker 2: incident where the Apollo thirteen spacecraft completely lost power, three
Speaker 2: astronauts lives hanging in the balance, and the NASA engineers
Speaker 2: basically had just a few hours to improvise a solution,
Speaker 2: and they had a very closed system. All they could
Speaker 2: use to save those wonderful lives was what was on
Speaker 2: board the spacecraft, and they had to use a shrink
Speaker 2: wrap to help make an air scrubber. They had to
Speaker 2: power the main capsule with the lunar module. Everything that
Speaker 2: they did was spur of the moment, working together as
Speaker 2: an amazing team bringing home the astronauts safely. Cut to
Speaker 2: Picasso working alone in his studio near the turn of
Speaker 2: the twentieth century painting this radical painting, the likes of
Speaker 2: which no one had ever seen before, and he was
Speaker 2: so nervous about it. He invited his mistress at the time,
Speaker 2: his gallery distributor to come, and they laughed at it,
Speaker 2: and he was feeling so uncomfortable and a shame. He
Speaker 2: actually rolled up the painting and hid it in his closet,
Speaker 2: but he kept feeling drawn to it, kept working on it,
Speaker 2: but still when he finished, he wasn't even quite sure
Speaker 2: he was finished, rolled it up again, put it in
Speaker 2: his closet for nine years, and then put it out
Speaker 2: into the world and became one of the breakthrough paintings
Speaker 2: of the twentieth century. Le Demoiselle Davignan. And so you've
Speaker 2: got the NASA engineers working collaboratively, Picasso working all by himself.
Speaker 2: The NASA engineers with a very targeted result. What they
Speaker 2: do has to work, it has to succeed otherwise the
Speaker 2: astronauts parish. Picasso is doing something much more open ended
Speaker 2: and speculative. He's inventing a new type of art. And
Speaker 2: yet when you look carefully at what they were doing,
Speaker 2: essentially their brains were doing very similar mental operations. They
Speaker 2: were creating variations on things that were already there. They
Speaker 2: were tearing up the world as they knew it and
Speaker 2: putting it back together in new ways, and they were
Speaker 2: mixing things in combinations that hadn't existed before, and each
Speaker 2: was applying it in their own domain, but under the
Speaker 2: hood of their brains what was happening is very deeply related.
Speaker 1: And it seems to be the key with creativity, right
Speaker 1: is absorbing everything in the world around you, absorbing your
Speaker 1: own experiences, and then remixing them, making something new out
Speaker 1: of it. And what we did when we wrote our
Speaker 1: book together is outlined sort of three different ways that
Speaker 1: this can happen, three different cognitive operations that the software
Speaker 1: of the brain is running. So tell us about those
Speaker 1: three operations. So we called them bending, breaking, and blending.
Speaker 1: Bending is making a copy and altering it. So fonts
Speaker 1: are a great example of bending. I mean, why do
Speaker 1: we need different typefaces for the same letters. They convey
Speaker 1: the same information. But we have this compulsion to bend,
Speaker 1: and so we create this unbelievable proliferation of variations. Jazz
Speaker 1: improvisation is a type of bending. Different car models are
Speaker 1: a type of bending. Anytime you take a prototype and
Speaker 1: you remake it in some way, that's.
Speaker 2: A version of bending. So breaking involves taking something complete
Speaker 2: and deconstructing it, tearing apart, pulling it apart into little
Speaker 2: pieces that's what makes an LED screen possible. It's where
Speaker 2: the birth of cell phones happened. Originally, there was only
Speaker 2: one phone tower per urban area, and as a result,
Speaker 2: only a few dozen people could get on their mobile
Speaker 2: phones at the same time, and calls were dropping. It
Speaker 2: was very frustrating, and then engineers at Bell Labs had
Speaker 2: this idea, oh wait, what if we break up the
Speaker 2: urban area into individual cells and give them each their
Speaker 2: own tower, And then they design software so you could
Speaker 2: drive in your car from one of those cells to
Speaker 2: another without losing the call. And basically, modern mobile communication
Speaker 2: was born out of that cognitive process of breaking and.
Speaker 1: Not everyone is aware, but that's how cell phone gets
Speaker 1: its name because the landscape is divided up into different.
Speaker 2: Cells exactly exactly, and like so many things, that ingenuity
Speaker 2: is hidden behind the scenes. We just take it for granted,
Speaker 2: not realizing that this fundamental cognitive operation is responsible for it.
Speaker 2: So blending, which is a term first introduced by our
Speaker 2: colleagues Mark Turner and Jills Fauconnier, involves combining two or
Speaker 2: more sources. And you know, a smartphone is a beautiful
Speaker 2: example of a blend. Mermaids and centaurs are blends of
Speaker 2: humans and animals. Compromise is a form of blending where
Speaker 2: you work out with another person, Oh, you know, what
Speaker 2: is our middle ground. I'll contribute something to the solution,
Speaker 2: and you'll contribute to something to the solution. Blending is
Speaker 2: so much a part of how we just approach our world. Again,
Speaker 2: we take it for granted, but that's how we get
Speaker 2: metaphors and house boats and fusion cuisine and so many
Speaker 2: of the things that are familiar to us in our world.
Speaker 1: Actually, so let's talk about that for a second, about
Speaker 1: the things that are hidden behind the scenes and the
Speaker 1: things that are obvious. So one of the things about
Speaker 1: the world of art is that the bending, breaking and
Speaker 1: blending is overt, is done so that everybody can see it.
Speaker 1: And in the case of scientific breakthroughs or technological breakthroughs,
Speaker 1: it's typically covert, as in most people don't see the
Speaker 1: things that's happening there. But the argument we made is
Speaker 1: that it's actually the same processes happening under the hood.
Speaker 1: Tell us about that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think that's one of the art's great cultural contributions.
Speaker 2: In a sense, they are contributing to science in externalizing
Speaker 2: internal features of how our minds work in a way
Speaker 2: that is often hard to see. You know, there's a
Speaker 2: cool example with YouTube. When you're watching HD video, you're
Speaker 2: actually not watching HD video. You're watching a mosaic of
Speaker 2: different levels of resolution, where YouTube is monitoring your computer's
Speaker 2: bandwidth in real time and sending the resolution that'll make
Speaker 2: it through. And the hope is that if there's enough
Speaker 2: HD in that stream, you just think you're watching a
Speaker 2: perfectly wonderful HD video and you don't realize that it's
Speaker 2: actually created by all these little fragments.
Speaker 1: So you mean, what I'm seeing is some sort of
Speaker 1: rough video, and then when my bandwidth is better for
Speaker 1: a moment, I see the very clear high definition video,
Speaker 1: and then I see some mixed up stuff in there.
Speaker 2: If it's done well, it happens all so fast that
Speaker 2: you don't notice the pebbles among pearls, and you just think, oh,
Speaker 2: this is great, My streaming is working perfectly. I'm not freezing,
Speaker 2: and so on and so forth. And if YouTube engineers
Speaker 2: have done their job, the creativity is completely hidden and
Speaker 2: you don't even know that it's there. You just think
Speaker 2: you're watching a video. What's wonderful and significant about the
Speaker 2: arts is that the goal is actually to share the
Speaker 2: inner workings of the creativity and have it be out
Speaker 2: in the open, so you see the bending, breaking and
Speaker 2: blending in a way that everyone can share. There's an
Speaker 2: exhibition that the installation artist Christian Markley made where essentially
Speaker 2: he told the time by clips from movies that showed
Speaker 2: a clock in the background at that specific time. So
Speaker 2: the way that installation works is it runs twenty four
Speaker 2: hours a day. You can show up at any time
Speaker 2: you want and say as long as you want, and
Speaker 2: each second is shown by a different scene from a movie.
Speaker 2: It's exactly the same principle at work in the YouTube,
Speaker 2: but now you're actually experiencing the bending, breaking and blending
Speaker 2: in front of you.
Speaker 1: Okay. So one of the questions that comes up often
Speaker 1: is you look at some new invention and you think, wow,
Speaker 1: that came out of the blue. For example, in two
Speaker 1: thousand and six, when Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone, one
Speaker 1: of the reporters there called it the Jesus phone, by
Speaker 1: which he meant it was an immaculate conception, nothing like
Speaker 1: that had existed before, and then it just showed up.
Speaker 1: But in fact, every idea has a genealogy that can
Speaker 1: be traced in this case. You know, in nineteen ninety three,
Speaker 1: IBM had introduced a cell phone with a touch screen.
Speaker 1: Now this was very you know, earlier technology, So it
Speaker 1: was a big brick of a cell phone and it
Speaker 1: had just allows you little touch screen. But the idea
Speaker 1: is that there's a smooth progression from there to here.
Speaker 1: And this is true of all ideas. And this doesn't
Speaker 1: reduce anything about the amazingness of the idea, the importance
Speaker 1: of the idea. But everything has a genealogy because we
Speaker 1: are remixing what's already in there and coming up with
Speaker 1: new versions of things. So the question is, you know,
Speaker 1: how do new ideas evolve.
Speaker 2: So new ideas evolve, we would say through this cognitive
Speaker 2: process of bending, breaking, and blending. We take our storehouse
Speaker 2: with experiences and essentially our minds are like a food
Speaker 2: processor that scrambles it all up and comes up with
Speaker 2: new possibilities. And that ability to generate what ifs and
Speaker 2: hypotheticals is frankly part of what makes it most fun
Speaker 2: to be a human being. I don't think we appreciate
Speaker 2: just how much improvisation is part of our daily lives.
Speaker 2: I mean, having a conversation is an improvisation. You know,
Speaker 2: cookie dinner can be improvising. It takes a lot of
Speaker 2: improvisation to raise your kids. Every time, we're making flexible solutions,
Speaker 2: combining our inputs and coming up with some new wonderful
Speaker 2: way to you know, entertain the kids or keep our
Speaker 2: loved ones interested in us. We are being creative and
Speaker 2: all of that relies on the bending, breaking and blending.
Speaker 1: So given this, given that we absorb our world and
Speaker 1: remix it and spit out something new, how does your
Speaker 1: time and place matter?
Speaker 2: So one thing very beautifully you've shared with your podcast
Speaker 2: audiences is that a lot of our brains development happens
Speaker 2: out in the world rather than in the womb. And
Speaker 2: that makes us neurologically incredibly susceptible to our environment and
Speaker 2: our upbringing. And you that with human creativity and our
Speaker 2: way that we build community, and you end up with
Speaker 2: incredible diversity around the world. I know this very well
Speaker 2: in music my field, because you take somebody like Beethoven,
Speaker 2: who was probably the most experimental, radical European composer of
Speaker 2: his day, doing extraordinary things that were far ahead of
Speaker 2: his time, but he never asked people to detom their
Speaker 2: instruments to create beating. He didn't use the breathing into
Speaker 2: a fluid for expressive purposes and make extraneous noises, and
Speaker 2: consider that part of the drama. But that was happening
Speaker 2: in honored traditions in Japan and the Far East at
Speaker 2: the same time, halfway around the world. Their notion of
Speaker 2: what was beautiful, what was meaningful was very different from Beethoven,
Speaker 2: and to the people in each of those cultures, those
Speaker 2: were complete, self contained, absolutely compelling worlds, and yet in
Speaker 2: many ways not with much overlap.
Speaker 1: That's right, and this is why all new ideas evolve
Speaker 1: from the old based on your culture. One of the
Speaker 1: pictures that we have in the book is the evolution
Speaker 1: of Greek helmets through time, and it's fascinating to see
Speaker 1: the way that the models evolve and change, but each
Speaker 1: one is clearly a function of what came before it.
Speaker 1: But if you look at war helmets from across the
Speaker 1: world and some other place in the world, they are
Speaker 1: quite different. And this is because we take whatever we
Speaker 1: have around us, whatever we absorb, and we use that
Speaker 1: as the fodder that we're operating on. So what's fascinating
Speaker 1: is that humans are so compelled to bend, break and
Speaker 1: blend all the time. We sort of never stop doing this,
Speaker 1: and so tell us about that.
Speaker 2: You know, sometimes there's this sphere everything that can be
Speaker 2: done has already been done. There was even a book
Speaker 2: at the turn of the twentieth century that said all
Speaker 2: diseases had been cured. There was nothing left to do.
Speaker 2: And you know, artists are always anxious. You know, it's
Speaker 2: all been done, there's nothing new. But the story of
Speaker 2: humanity is that there is no finish line because this
Speaker 2: software is running in our brains all the time, and
Speaker 2: just by bouncing off of what came right before us,
Speaker 2: we're constantly pushing the envelope and going farther and farther.
Speaker 2: And so, you know, you go from the stone age
Speaker 2: of the very first knives to this amazing display in
Speaker 2: countries like Polynesia of knives of every shape and size,
Speaker 2: to you know, Swiss army knives and the latest gizmos
Speaker 2: that are sold on late in ITV and on and
Speaker 2: on it goes without stop, without stopping, and there's really
Speaker 2: nothing where you can say, well, we reached the endpoint
Speaker 2: and it can't get any better, including strativarious violins, where
Speaker 2: now they're making them out of carbon fiber. They're lighter,
Speaker 2: they are more durable, they don't warp in different weather
Speaker 2: and people can't even tell the difference sometimes, and the
Speaker 2: new instrument sounds just as beautiful as a strad umbrellas
Speaker 2: you think, you know, most of us are like, okay,
Speaker 2: the umbrella. You know, it's functional, it does what it
Speaker 2: needs to do, keeps the rain off pretty much. People
Speaker 2: have stopped working on that. Actually, so many people are
Speaker 2: trying to make umbrellas that there are four people whose
Speaker 2: full time job it is in the patent office to
Speaker 2: review patents for new umbrellas. There's nowhere you look where
Speaker 2: you say case closed, it's finished. Just stop right.
Speaker 1: People are trying to patent umbrellas where the for example,
Speaker 1: the ribs bend the other way, or it's asymmetrical for
Speaker 1: the wind, or you wear it like a backpack, and
Speaker 1: on and on. Yeah, exactly. And in your field in music,
Speaker 1: how do you see that, this constant compulsion to bend,
Speaker 1: break and blend.
Speaker 2: Well, you see that in covers of songs in a
Speaker 2: jazz improvisation, I mean, night after night, the same performer
Speaker 2: will go and play the same wonderful jazz standard somewhere
Speaker 2: over the rainbow. But it will never be the same
Speaker 2: way twice. And you know, if you walked up to
Speaker 2: that performer and said, well, you know, is that the
Speaker 2: last time you're ever going to do this, then will
Speaker 2: look look at you, you know, like what are you
Speaker 2: talking about. The whole thrill of it is to constantly
Speaker 2: reimagine and you know, come up with a new version.
Speaker 1: And you see this bending, breaking and blending in language
Speaker 1: all around us too.
Speaker 2: Language is really built as a wonderful bending, breaking and
Speaker 2: blending tool. For instance, there's fringe for lan slang where
Speaker 2: syllables are flipped. So the word meshon, which means you're
Speaker 2: being mean, is sean May and originally it was developed
Speaker 2: by you know, people in the underworld, so the Katalkan
Speaker 2: code and the police wildn't understand what they were saying,
Speaker 2: but verlong became so commonplace that now just everybody in
Speaker 2: France uses it, and then abbreviations are great examples of breaking.
Speaker 2: The word gymnasium is the Greek word for exercising in
Speaker 2: the nude, and we very comfortably turned that into jim
Speaker 2: with you know, a less exacting dress code and blending
Speaker 2: happens all the time in composite words railroad, heart, throb, suitcase, etc.
Speaker 2: And in fact, one of the interesting things is different
Speaker 2: languages will blend different words to express the same idea.
Speaker 2: So we call it a rail road. In French, it's
Speaker 2: chamande fair, which means iron road. And part of the
Speaker 2: fun of excavating languages is to see how different brains
Speaker 2: in different communities are marring eye in different ways.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you know, it's always been interesting to me how
Speaker 1: invisible these blends become to us. For example, I think
Speaker 1: it's the case that most people don't think about the
Speaker 1: word rainbow as you know, a bow like a bow
Speaker 1: and arrow that you get from the rain. But that's
Speaker 1: how language evolves, is by putting things together like that.
Speaker 1: Let's come back to this issue about science and art.
Speaker 1: So one example that is very cool is with chimeras.
Speaker 1: So in the world of art, there's this idea of
Speaker 1: putting together different creatures. You mentioned a mermaid before, we're
Speaker 1: putting together a woman and a fish, and you get
Speaker 1: this mermaid. And what's interesting is that you see these
Speaker 1: same kind of things happening in science. So tell us
Speaker 1: about the goat named freckles.
Speaker 2: So there's Freckles, a spider goat. How did that come
Speaker 2: to be? Well, spider silk is one of the strongest
Speaker 2: materials in nature and could potentially be used for things
Speaker 2: like bulletproof bests. But the problem is it's very hard
Speaker 2: to harvest spider silk. You put enough spiders together and
Speaker 2: they eat each other. It takes literally millions of them
Speaker 2: just to create a few square yards of silk. So
Speaker 2: scientists were wondering, you know, is there a more efficient
Speaker 2: way that we could produce this, And there was a
Speaker 2: biologist who came up with the idea of splicing the
Speaker 2: gene or spider silk into the genetic code of a goat,
Speaker 2: and thus was born Freckles, the spider goat who secretes
Speaker 2: spider silk in her milk. And they've been able to
Speaker 2: harvest significant quantities of that by creating an actual, real
Speaker 2: life chimera.
Speaker 1: So is what is happening in the brain of a
Speaker 1: chemist different than what's happening in the brain of a composer.
Speaker 2: To some degree, of course, it takes special expertise and
Speaker 2: knowledge to be a chemist. That's really different from the
Speaker 2: preparation that takes to write a piece of music. But
Speaker 2: the amazing thing about human beings is that we apply
Speaker 2: our creativity to everything we do. So there is a
Speaker 2: part of what we are born equipped with that is
Speaker 2: a general purpose creativity software that can be mobilized for
Speaker 2: anything we care to apply our creativity to. That, again,
Speaker 2: is one of the superpowers that we have as a species.
Speaker 1: This is really what has launched humans into this success
Speaker 1: that we've had compared to all our animal neighbors. You know,
Speaker 1: we've erected skyscrapers and composed symphony and invent you know,
Speaker 1: medicines and get to the moon and stuff like that.
Speaker 1: Because each generation that's born doesn't have to you know,
Speaker 1: just live the life of what happened before them, they
Speaker 1: can learn about that because of brain plasticity, they can
Speaker 1: absorb everything that came before them and then springboard off
Speaker 1: that into the future. And the way they do that
Speaker 1: is by taking in all that data and then remixing
Speaker 1: it and coming up with new versions of things.
Speaker 2: No, I mean again, not to take anything away from animals,
Speaker 2: but if you were like a guidance counselor for crocodiles
Speaker 2: fifty thousand years ago, and you know, what are you
Speaker 2: going to do with your life. The answer would be
Speaker 2: pretty much the same then as it is now. And
Speaker 2: if you were a guidance counselor for the earliest hominids,
Speaker 2: I mean to say they would be astonished at the
Speaker 2: possibilities of what a human being can do now, you know,
Speaker 2: would be a big understatement. And every single bit of
Speaker 2: that is due to creativity running in every single human brain.
Speaker 1: That's right, And we do see creativity happening in various
Speaker 1: ways in the animal world. There's just not nearly as
Speaker 1: much of it.
Speaker 2: So, yes, there's creativity in the animal kingdom, for sure,
Speaker 2: but it's very targeted. So there are birds that design
Speaker 2: very colorful creative ness, but they sing the same song
Speaker 2: all the time. There are whale songs that change in
Speaker 2: pods over time, but they don't apply their creativity in
Speaker 2: other parts of their lives. What makes human special is
Speaker 2: we treat creativity as this all purpose, general purpose tool
Speaker 2: that we apply to everything that we do.
Speaker 1: Right, So, as brains take in data, they're constantly bending
Speaker 1: and breaking and blending that data to come up with
Speaker 1: new things. And we do this more than other animals.
Speaker 1: And when we look at what is different or special
Speaker 1: about human brains, what we see are a few things.
Speaker 1: One of them is just the size of the core
Speaker 1: texas the wrinkly outer part. We just have much more
Speaker 1: of it than any of our neighbors as a relative
Speaker 1: to our body size. And one of the things that
Speaker 1: gives is much more real estate in between the inputs
Speaker 1: and the outputs. So if you're a cat and I
Speaker 1: put some food in front of you, your visual system
Speaker 1: is going to see that and your motor system is
Speaker 1: going to eat the food. But with humans, because we
Speaker 1: have more computational capacity in between the in and the out,
Speaker 1: we can say, Okay, maybe I won't eat it, I'm
Speaker 1: on a diet, maybe I'll eat it later. Things like that.
Speaker 1: We just have more options, more possibilities that we can
Speaker 1: take as a result. The other thing is we have
Speaker 1: these huge frontal lobes, that's the part behind the forehead,
Speaker 1: and this is what allows us to simulate what ifs,
Speaker 1: possible futures. And this is a really big deal. And
Speaker 1: this is what I've suggested in a different episode is what,
Speaker 1: at least at the moment, as far as we can tell,
Speaker 1: separates us from AI is that AI can be massively
Speaker 1: creative because it's constantly bending and breaking and blending things.
Speaker 1: It does a really good job at that. But the
Speaker 1: thing that allows humans to do scientific discovery, at least
Speaker 1: the moment that AI can't do is think about what
Speaker 1: ifs and then evaluate those and think about, Okay, how
Speaker 1: would I know if I were writing on a photon
Speaker 1: and going the speed of light? What would things be like?
Speaker 1: What would things look like? That's what we are really
Speaker 1: good at.
Speaker 2: Doing, building out what you're saying. A lot of the
Speaker 2: large languid models are also aimed towards the mean. They're
Speaker 2: aimed towards the average. They're aim towards the most common solution,
Speaker 2: because that makes the AI more likely to be correct.
Speaker 2: And humans are able sometimes to choose unlikely propositions and
Speaker 2: then develop them and build them. So you know, you
Speaker 2: think about the theory of relativity, for instance, and so
Speaker 2: I sign comes up with the idea, wait, the speed
Speaker 2: of light is constant to all observers, rather than trying
Speaker 2: to fold that into our real life experience and our
Speaker 2: common sense says with how the world works, he's able
Speaker 2: to go beyond that, beyond any availab data that he
Speaker 2: had in his time, to realize that that meant you
Speaker 2: get heavier as you approach the speed of light, that
Speaker 2: absolute simultaneity doesn't exist, that there's such a thing as
Speaker 2: superluminal connections. And right now AI systems are totally constrained
Speaker 2: by their data and they will always attempt to normalize it.
Speaker 1: What's interesting is that you can push the AI by
Speaker 1: the way and force it to give you less and
Speaker 1: less probable answers. And interestingly, people talk about this as
Speaker 1: hallucination of these large language models. But another way to
Speaker 1: view this is hypothesis generation. It's really great actually at
Speaker 1: saying okay, well maybe this maybe that. The interesting part
Speaker 1: is it doesn't have the capacity right now to say, hey,
Speaker 1: here's an interesting hypothesis. Now I'm going to actually evaluate
Speaker 1: that and think about it that way. It just doesn't
Speaker 1: have the capacity to do that. But what it does
Speaker 1: seem to have is the capacity to bend, break, and blend,
Speaker 1: which is very cool. So you know, ten years ago
Speaker 1: when people were talking about computers, people said, okay, well,
Speaker 1: computers can't be creative, and the reason was because they
Speaker 1: weren't doing bending, breaking, blending. They were just repeating whatever
Speaker 1: was put in. Now they're actually doing that remixing all
Speaker 1: the time, which allows us to be creative. The interesting
Speaker 1: part is there are actually two sides to creativity. One
Speaker 1: is the generation of new ideas, and the other is
Speaker 1: the filtering. You say, Okay, well that was not so good.
Speaker 1: That was that's so good. And humans, you know, we
Speaker 1: happen to know what it is like to be other humans,
Speaker 1: and so we're pretty good at saying, okay, I'm going
Speaker 1: to bag that one and kill that one because that
Speaker 1: won't be interesting to my fellow people. But computers at
Speaker 1: the moment aren't so good at the filtering part.
Speaker 2: I one hundred percent agree that. Get back to the
Speaker 2: whole time and place. We're born into a particular cultural situation,
Speaker 2: and we are very aptible, and we're very sensitive to
Speaker 2: the community and how they will respond and what's taking
Speaker 2: things too far, what's so implausible, No one will understand it,
Speaker 2: what's so ordinary, it'll just get overlooked. And the computer
Speaker 2: right now isn't able to evaluate itself in that way
Speaker 2: exactly as you're saying. It doesn't recognize when it has
Speaker 2: its own best ideas and then says, wait a second,
Speaker 2: that was a really good one. Let me build on that.
Speaker 2: And it has no sense at all of this. One
Speaker 2: will fly and that joke is just not funny at all.
Speaker 1: Right, because it doesn't know what it is like to
Speaker 1: be a human and find something funny.
Speaker 2: Right. Yes, And I think one of the most interesting
Speaker 2: things about AI creativity as it's developing is the light
Speaker 2: it shines on some of the unexplored and underappreciated facets
Speaker 2: of human creativity. So, for instance, AI is essentially a
Speaker 2: great improviser. It works on the same principle as the
Speaker 2: yes and principle in theater, going from one thing to
Speaker 2: the next, to the next to the next, but never
Speaker 2: looking backwards, never questioning itself, never saying, oh, well, now
Speaker 2: that I ended up here, let me go back and
Speaker 2: revise the first chapter. We have this incredible time jumping,
Speaker 2: reverse chronology, flexible way of looking at things holistically and granularly.
Speaker 2: I mean again, one is just awe struck at the
Speaker 2: power of the machinery that we have in terms of
Speaker 2: the flexibility of turning things right side up, upside down
Speaker 2: and inside out.
Speaker 1: So how does our social context affect our creativity?
Speaker 2: So it's great to have this machinery we've been talking
Speaker 2: about working in our heads, but what really supercharges is
Speaker 2: our need to engage each other. As you've shared on
Speaker 2: the podcast, brains are infotropic, so they're attracted to new information,
Speaker 2: and that's really critical for social bonding. Imagine waking up
Speaker 2: every day and saying that the same thing to your
Speaker 2: loved one, getting them the same present for their birthday,
Speaker 2: cooking them the same thing for dinner. It's hard to
Speaker 2: imagine that a relationship is going to last very long
Speaker 2: because we tune out to the familiar, and there's a
Speaker 2: phenomenon repetition suppression, where the more stimulus is repetitive or predictable,
Speaker 2: the less attention we pay to it. And you can
Speaker 2: see this on neuroimaging scans, where the first time someone
Speaker 2: has shown a surprise, you know, a huge part of
Speaker 2: their brain lights up. But then if you keep repeating
Speaker 2: that surprise at regular intervals, eventually becomes a tiny little
Speaker 2: dot in the brain. Their brain has made it part
Speaker 2: of its internal model of reality and doesn't care anymore.
Speaker 2: And that is fatal to social relationships. And as essentially
Speaker 2: the most social species on the planet, we learned to
Speaker 2: leverage our creativity to keep the people around us enchanted.
Speaker 2: You know, often it's talked about the birth of human
Speaker 2: culture was sitting around a campfire telling stories after hunting
Speaker 2: wooly mammoths, and to a large degree, that probably gets
Speaker 2: to the heart of why we are such a creative species.
Speaker 1: That's right. Yeah, you see it. At dinner party, someone
Speaker 1: tells the funny story and everyone laughs. You would never
Speaker 1: see someone then tell that story a second time, right then,
Speaker 1: right exactly, And nobody watches the basketball game from last
Speaker 1: week a second time. There's no reason to watch it
Speaker 1: a second time. What we care about is the surprise,
Speaker 1: the new information, that's right, And this is because the
Speaker 1: brain is constantly seeking to update its internal model, and
Speaker 1: it does so by surprise. When it sees something that
Speaker 1: it was not expecting, then it knows, Oops, there's a
Speaker 1: place that I need to improve the model over there.
Speaker 1: And so that's why we're totally attracted to surprise and
Speaker 1: things that are novel.
Speaker 2: And I would go so far as to say that
Speaker 2: creativity became one of our most useful tools for self
Speaker 2: generating surprise. In other words, we like our internal model
Speaker 2: of reality to always be under construction because that keeps
Speaker 2: us very engaged in alert and in a sense partners
Speaker 2: with consciousness and keeping us present in the moment and
Speaker 2: connected to each other.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And in the animal world we see this trade
Speaker 1: off between exploration and exploitation. In other words, animals explore
Speaker 1: their environment and they try to figure out what's going on,
Speaker 1: and once they get it, okay, I can get the
Speaker 1: grubworms under these rocks or whatever. They spend about eighty
Speaker 1: percent of their time exploiting the data that they know,
Speaker 1: but across the animal kingdom they spend about twenty percent
Speaker 1: of their time exploring new things. And it turns out
Speaker 1: this is evolutionarily very useful because you never know when
Speaker 1: the world is going to change. So if you're constantly
Speaker 1: keeping a finger on the pulse of other possible paths,
Speaker 1: that's the way to stay alive when things change.
Speaker 2: And in a sense, that's the evolutionary roots of our creativity.
Speaker 2: We have the rest of the animal kingdom to thank
Speaker 2: for that exploration necessity being built into our brains, and
Speaker 2: then our need to build community kind of took that
Speaker 2: to the next level.
Speaker 1: So that was my friend Anthony Brandt, and in the
Speaker 1: book we co authored, The Runaway Species, we examined how
Speaker 1: human brains generate creativity by constantly remixing its inputs, and
Speaker 1: this is we argue part of the basic operating system
Speaker 1: of the brain. So the way to think about this
Speaker 1: is if you look at a graphics program that says, hi,
Speaker 1: I rotate photographs by forty five degrees. The program doesn't
Speaker 1: care what the photograph is. The photo can be of
Speaker 1: ostriches or kazoos or volcanoes or whatever. The program doesn't care.
Speaker 1: It just performs the rotation operation on the pixels. It
Speaker 1: just doesn't matter what the photograph is about. And this
Speaker 1: is the same thing your brain is doing. You are
Speaker 1: born in your moment of space and time, and you
Speaker 1: move through the world and absorb the art and science
Speaker 1: and language around you, and that's what you remix. So,
Speaker 1: as Anthony said, if you're born in Japan five hundred
Speaker 1: years ago, you will write one kind of music, And
Speaker 1: if you are Beethoven born in Europe at the same time,
Speaker 1: you'll write a different kind of music because you're absorbing
Speaker 1: different data. And if you are in New York in
Speaker 1: the current day, you have a very different set of
Speaker 1: worldwide music to draw from. And if you're composing twenty
Speaker 1: five years from now, your diet will consist of ai
Speaker 1: music and things you never even realized. You hadn't thought
Speaker 1: of new innovations driven by humans and by machines, and
Speaker 1: that's what you'll take to be the background furniture, and
Speaker 1: you'll in on that. So, given what we talked about today,
Speaker 1: I want to circle back to the controversies I highlighted
Speaker 1: at the beginning of the episode where Open AI is
Speaker 1: getting sued and Under Armour is getting criticized because people
Speaker 1: are saying that the AI is merely absorbing what is
Speaker 1: out there and then remixing its own versions. And I
Speaker 1: think it's an interesting question to ask whether humans have
Speaker 1: ever done otherwise, because that's what human creativity is, and
Speaker 1: we typically like to compliment ourselves and tell the story
Speaker 1: of how we came up with things out of the blue,
Speaker 1: leveraging our individual brilliance. But the fact is we are
Speaker 1: each born in a particular place, in a particular moment
Speaker 1: of time, and all we ever have to work with
Speaker 1: are the pieces and parts that our culture provides, pieces
Speaker 1: and parts that have each been touched on and worked
Speaker 1: over by the people before us. So, although it's a
Speaker 1: jagged pill to swallow, it's interesting to consider this possibility.
Speaker 1: Let's say about that Under Armoured commercial that was accused
Speaker 1: of copying the styles of work from several other creatives
Speaker 1: without proper acknowledgment. If a human director had made that
Speaker 1: same ad a few years ago, we would have agreed.
Speaker 1: Of course, he took inspiration from the work of other creatives.
Speaker 1: That's his diet, that's what he has to draw from,
Speaker 1: and we certainly would have no expectation that at the
Speaker 1: end of his commercial he would list all the sources,
Speaker 1: all the other commercials from which he took inspiration. We
Speaker 1: wouldn't say, hey, you remixed all these inspirations without proper acknowledgement.
Speaker 1: And in fact, this is what companies like OpenAI and
Speaker 1: Meta are arguing in court now that their language models
Speaker 1: learn from books the same way that humans do. The
Speaker 1: language models original work that is a transformation of its sources,
Speaker 1: just like humans do. Therefore, these companies are arguing in
Speaker 1: courte that this training is legal. It is quote quintessential
Speaker 1: fair use unquote. So we're in an interesting time. Is
Speaker 1: it just human chauvinism where we're okay remixing things ourselves,
Speaker 1: but we don't want a machine doing it because it
Speaker 1: can do it faster. I don't know the answer to this,
Speaker 1: but I do think the questions about creativity will gain
Speaker 1: refinement as we get clearer on what human brains actually
Speaker 1: do and what AI does, and what these have in common.
Speaker 1: In any case, one of the great pleasures of being
Speaker 1: here on this planet, whether we're surrounded by other humans
Speaker 1: or by machines, is that, even though we often feel
Speaker 1: like everything that can be done has already been done,
Speaker 1: there's just no end on the horizon for what this
Speaker 1: run of way species and our inventions will create. Next.
Speaker 1: Go to eagleman dot com slash podcast for more information
Speaker 1: and to find further reading. Send me an email at
Speaker 1: podcast at eagleman dot com with questions or discussion, and
Speaker 1: check out and subscribe to Inner Cosmos on YouTube for
Speaker 1: videos of each episode and to leave comments. Until next time.
Speaker 1: I'm David Eagleman, and this is Inner Cosmos.